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Yes, but was there in 1970? I've looked at the 'Duck Tape' advertising campaign, and it looks a lot to me like a company trying to convert 'the public meme' over from a generic term (duct Tape) to something they've trademarked.

Actually there is evidence that it was duck tape first and when it started being used on ducts the name changed. Of course, HVAC ducts is one of the only things I wouldn't use duct tape on.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape#Etymology [wikipedia.org]

NASA engineers and astronauts have used duct tape in the course of their work,
including in some emergency situations. One such usage occurred in 1970, when
the square carbon dioxide filters from Apollo 13's failed command module had
to be modified to fit round receptacles in the lunar module, which was being
used as a lifeboat after an explosion en route to the moon. A workaround was
made using duct tape and other items on board Apollo 13, with the ground crew
relaying directions to the spacecraft and its crew. The lunar module CO2 scrubbers
started working again, saving the lives of the three astronauts on board.

Ed Smylie, who designed the scrubber modification in just two days, said later
that he knew the problem was solvable when it was confirmed that duct tape was
on the spacecraft: "I felt like we were home free", he said in 2005.
"One thing a Southern boy will never say is, 'I don't think duct tape will
fix it.'"[3]

I'm sorry but that sounds like a racist comment. Like you really wanted to say "How about sending a Kenyan out into space".

Or "Let's put a Kenyan in charge of our Space Program and see what happens."

You, sir, indulge in way too much unfounded conspiracy and idle fantasy!

Next thing you're going to tell me we've never been to the moon (which is really going to hamper bidding on the auction for the Apollo 13 note books). I mean just because we haven't been back, let alone even left sub-orbital altitudes for li

Whoever it is selling this deserves a lot of pity. Whether it be NASA who needs the money or an old NASA employee (maybe astronaut?) who needs the money or an old collector who needs the money or the estate of an old collector or NASA employee that needs to liquidate it, there really must be a sad story behind the selling of an item that belongs in a museum.

Every Level 9 visitor of Johnson Space Center can hold in his hands the (original) Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Operation Plan, probably used and touched by Gene Krantz and others, while visiting the historical Apollo mission control room. It's on the left side of the room, stockpiled with other various files.

Gee if only we had a government body charged with the preservation of important historical documents. Oh wait! We do! [archives.gov] I don't understand why these items aren't going to the National Archives. Its not like they are gonna raise enough money for a rocket or anything. The Smithsonian Institution would be a better home than some private collection.

All that museum has to do is outbid that private collector. If they can't do that, then they must not have been a better place for those documents. I tire of these vapid arguments for the public good. If you want museums to be able to outbid collectors for stuff like this, then give the museums money for the purpose. At least now, it's likely that the documents will be preserved for the future rather than end up in a dumpster (which is what is happening too often with NASA documents at NASA's official libra

Oh you 'tire', do you? Well thank you, King Lear, for that bit of input. When you're done playing with yourself as you think about Ayn Rand, maybe you can get back to the real world? You actually tried to apply social Darwinism to a museum...how's that "let's monetize everything, including our history" thing going for ya?

Also: did you miss the whole "distribution of wealth" bit? Let me break it down for you: top %5 of wealth-holders possess roughly 60% of all wealth in the country. This is 2004 figures

You actually tried to apply social Darwinism to a museum...how's that "let's monetize everything, including our history" thing going for ya?

It's called "economics" not "social Darwinism". Monetizing history is so very American and beats throwing history away (the other so very American approach). You propose to dump this document along with thousands, if not millions of similar documents on some hapless museum without corresponding funding. What do you think will happen? I think this stuff would get thrown away. Consider how that document likely found its way into private hands in th

I had none myself but it always fascinated me how people reacted to it.

Why are you interested in the reaction to money? What makes that special to you? How about the reaction to dogshit? All I know, is that some of the creepiest people I ever knew were interested in stuff like that. I guess it helped them understand their prey.

The next time you see a 'self-made-man' do a little research; you'll probably find a rich older person in his past helping him out.

So it's turtles all the way down? Rich people are rich because they're related to rich people? Or because they take advantage of the opportunities that they get?

Here's my take. Successful people are often people who were helped by successful people. Y

Most successful people I know are not rich. Many rich people I know are not what I would call successful.

Maybe you're right. Or maybe this is just sour grapes. I wouldn't know.

The thing that bothers me here is the mythology expressed in this thread tree. Namely, that money comes only by either taking it from someone else, or being closely related to someone who already has it. I get the impression that if I want to be rich, I'm supposed to grind up orphans for glue, marry someone with a lot of money, or have the good sense to be related to a recently deceased with a lot of money. It's the sort of thing you'

And where did Mummy and Daddy get it from? It didn't magically come to those people

I did say it was old money, made generations back when people perhaps got away with a lot more. No it didn't "magically" come to them, but it was obtained on the backs of thousands of ignorant workers, and business practices that were questionable to say the least.

The Rockerfellers made their money mostly by being the first US oil monopoly and aggressively killing any competition.

A lot of monied families got where they are through scams, usually made possible through more family money or connections. One that we are still seeing the political aftershocks of is the Teapot Dome Scandal [senate.gov]. It started out as bribery [hnn.us] in the 1920's and leaves us today in the Middle East.

I did say it was old money, made generations back when people perhaps got away with a lot more. No it didn't "magically" come to them, but it was obtained on the backs of thousands of ignorant workers, and business practices that were questionable to say the least.

It was also obtained by offering something of great value. Rockefeller created the first true, modern oil infrastructure from well to gas station. Vanderbilt built railroads that greatly aided US industry. Edison developed through his R&D organization, many electrical devices used today (particularly the incandescent light bulb), modern electricity delivery infrastructure, and the very concept of a private R&D business.

There's a simple rebuttal to the claim that all wealth comes from old money. O

Let me break it down for you: top %5 of wealth-holders possess roughly 60% of all wealth in the country.

Let's ignore the possibility that perhaps they EARNED that money, and point out that it would be hard for poor people to hold most of the wealth, wouldn't it? Unless, of course, we had a LOT of them-- which is what some on the left really want. By the way, that top 5% also pays 61% of income tax.

However, the top 5% typically don't pay their share of FICA, which ranges from 15% for the poor down to maybe 12% for those on the edge of not paying it. (The half euphemistically called "employer contribution" is not taxed as income.) FICA is a major burden on the low income earner, and means that the millionaire has less marginal tax on earned income than the upper middle class earner.

I hope you are being ironic but I can't tell. If you're serious then it requires rebuttal. If a museum doesn't have interesting artifacts, then they don't attract visitors. If they don't attract visitors they don't have admissions income (or in the case of free museums have a hard time justifying the public funding they receive). Without income, they can't acquire interesting artifacts. It is a catch 22. If museums had to be run as a business and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we wouldn't have any museums. All the great museums owe their existence to gift or public grant: The Louvre, The British Museum, The Smithsonian, American Museum of Natural History.

If these items are currently NASA property then transferring an asset from one government body to another has zero cost and the museum should not have to pay to acquire them. If these are not NASA property then there are one of two possibilities. 1) They are stolen US Government property. 2) NASA was wrong to transfer them to private ownership in the first place.

If museums had to be run as a business and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we wouldn't have any museums.

I am being serious and this is wrong. First, there are museums being run as a business. Second, a museum doesn't have to be run as a business to succeed. You already mentioned donations to the museum.

If these items are currently NASA property then transferring an asset from one government body to another has zero cost and the museum should not have to pay to acquire them. If these are not NASA property then there are one of two possibilities. 1) They are stolen US Government property. 2) NASA was wrong to transfer them to private ownership in the first place.

Wrong again. Someone has to pay to transfer and store the item. As I mention elsewhere, the likely reason that this item is being auctioned in the first place, was because NASA had to choose between throwing these documents away and giving them to private ownership. They chose the latter and saved a piece of hi

You're talking as if donating to them to a museum rather than throwing them away or auctioning them would be inconceivable.

You don't understand the quantity of documentation that NASA is sitting on. I understand there are warehouses of the stuff. Even the more valuable stuff is crammed into a few small libraries which have to make room every so often. IMHO there's not enough museums to accept these donations or store the documentation (unless, the museum is allowed to throw away the less useful stuff). There's not enough manpower to sort through the stuff and figure out what is what. Most of it will be thrown away.

Yes. If it's a question of preservation, many private collectors will do an equal or better job. They have a personal vested interest in preserving it, and there's less of a chance of it being stolen (not on public display). Of course, the public won't be able to see it themselves, but all they need to do is scan it once.

They have a personal vested interest in preserving it, and there's less of a chance of it being stolen (not on public display).

The last big-time gallery heist in the U.S. was in 1990.

On March 18, 1990, the Gardner Museum was robbed by two unknown white males dressed in police uniforms and identifying themselves a Boston police officers. The unknown subjects gained entrance into the museum by advising on-duty security personnel that they were responding to a call of a disturbance within the compound. Securi

I don't understand why these items aren't going to the National Archives. Its not like they are gonna raise enough money for a rocket or anything. The Smithsonian Institution would be a better home than some private collection.

Let's see... You wan't to have the government place these items in some government run institution, so we can all "share" equal access to them? Instead of letting the free market "take care" of priceless historical artifacts?
Sounds kind of like communism to me.

It is entirely possible that these items are actually PRIVATELY owned now... For instance, the brush that was used on Apollo 14 to clean camera lenses, according to the description, was presented to Fred Haise for his help in the Apollo 14 mission. It says the other astronauts on that mission "gave" it to him. I don't know if they had the right to "give" it to him - our tax dollars paid for the brush, and more importantly, paid to fly it to the moon. But assuming that NASA allowed the astronauts to "have

Is it wrong that I'm a little dismayed at this? IMHO these belong in the National Archives, or at the Smithsonian's Air & Space museum, not in the hands of the highest bidder. They're a part of our space program's history, and deserve to be preserved.

Yes, it is wrong. Where are these museums going to put this stuff? Who is going to pay for storage and maintenance? As I understand it, NASA has warehouses of this stuff. The Smithsonian (and other museums) could pick most of it up, if they wanted to. They don't because that would require spending a lot of money they don't have.

In effect, no one will ever see it again. Why can't NASA give it to a museum?

If you want to see it, go to the item listing page at Bonhams. [bonhams.com] You can see a high-resolution photo of both sides of the sheet. For the purposes of research or curiosity that's a much closer look than you would get if it were behind glass in a museum. Besides, even though the Air & Space museum is huge (they've got a Concorde, 727, SR-71, Space Shuttle, etc), they don't have room to preserve and display every piece of paper that an astronaut ever wrote on. This is ONE PAGE out a binder with hundreds of pages, which is one of thousands of binders NASA used in the space program. It's autographed on one side by Lovell, so I suspect this is from his personal binder and a some point he was using pages out of it for autographs instead of using photos. Just because something is collectible, doesn't mean it's historically significant.

In 1969, NASA put the command module and some other stuff on a trailer and toured the state capitals. The capsule was not behind glass or anything. The walkway led past it, and only a railing separated the audience from the capsule. I reached over to touch the heat shield. It was surprisingly brittle, and I scratched it experimentally to see how hard it was. It wasn't, and a bunch came off under a couple of my nails. I looked around, but nobody noticed, so I went to my family'

Interestingly its that brittleness that makes the heat shield so critical to protect, and why even the slightest scratch in it can cause catastrophic problems for the crew aboard. I'm sure you've realized this by now though, but they most likely never used the capsule after they decided to tour it anyway, so you couldn't have caused any real problems (other than the obvious vandalism of a priceless artifact of some of the most important scientific missions). That kind of stuff makes me wish I had been bor

Nowhere do you see any "do you really want to..." switches. I mean really, who would build such a space craft and only have a switch or button which doesn't have a secondary switch or button labeled "do you really want to?"(DYRWT) to be sure the operator wants to throw that switch? Or _really_ sure for that matter. It must be fake.

For those with less money, and in Chicago, the Adler Planetarium has a raft of events for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 13.
http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/special/index.shtml#apollo [adlerplanetarium.org]
And for those with a fair bit of money there is an expensive dinner with a bunch of astronauts, including the two still-living Apollo 13 astronauts.
www.adlerplanetarium.org/special/doc/Apollo13invite
(Yes, I know, seriously off-topic, but please don't punish!)